Repetitions in the speech of Russian language school teachers: A corpus-based study

Abstract

This study is part of a project aimed at describing the speech profile of schoolteachers and identifying the linguistic characteristics of effective teaching practices. The article analyzes exact immediate repetitions in the speech of schoolteachers during Russian language lessons in 5th–8th grades in several schools across the Russian Federation. We analyzed 16 lessons taught by more effective teachers and 9 lessons taught by less effective teachers (total recording duration: 920 minutes) and found 225 examples of exact immediate repetitions in the data. Regardless of effectiveness, teachers most often repeat individual words once, while multiple repetitions of longer units are significantly less common. Content words are repeated more often than function words. Of the latter ones, particles are the most frequently repeated. Differences between more effective and less effective teachers were found only for the parameter “Position in the sentence”: more effective teachers more often repeat entire sentences or what is at the end of a sentence, while the speech of less effective teachers is dominated by repetitions at the beginning of sentences. The number of repetitions is also influenced by the specific lesson and, apparently, the class in which the students study: in lessons in the 5th grade, repetitions were more common than in other classes. Thus, the frequency of occurrence and distribution of exact immediate repetitions in teachers’ speech cannot be considered as a reliable measure for distinguishing more effective Russian language teachers from less effective ones.